Searches with volume 0 are removed from the data set. For ahref analysis, only searches with volume > 100 are looked at. Analyses are based on US location.
~2.5 million searches were enriched with ahref. This includes the statistics difficulty, return rate, clicks, region volume, and SERP features.
| Statistic | Value |
|---|---|
| Total number of searches | ~306 million |
| Total volume of searches | ~303 billion |
| Searches with missing volume | 0.51% |
| Mean search volume | 989 |
| Median search volume | 10 |
| Mean CPC | 0.61 |
~14% of searches are in the form of a question. “how” is the most common question word.
Although only about 1% of the total volume of searches are questions
“how” and “the” are the most common stopwords, which are present in 6-8% of searches.
The most searched queries have length 6-9 characters, and falls continuously for search queries longer or shorter than that.
Internet & Telecom is the keyword category with the highest mean volume.
Arts & Entertainment, Internet & Telecom, and News, Media & Publications have the highest total volume.
Finance has the highest mean cost per click.
As volume increases, the difficulty increases.
The slope of the linear regression line is such that for each doubling of the volume, the difficulty increases by 1.63. For example, as the volume goes from 100 to 3200 (6 doublings), the difficulty increases by roughly 1.63 * 6 ~= 10.
Higher difficulty also means higher CPC on average. Note that the Y axis is logarithmic, so a small move on the y axis is a large increase in value. The bar in the middle indicates the median value, and it increases from 0.35 to 1.2 when going from easy to super hard difficulty.
Most of the searches with the highest volumes are attempts to go to a popular website.
| keyword | location | spell | spell_type | keyword_info_search_volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| jou tube | 2840 | youtube | showing_results_for | 1.85e+08 |
| youtube the | 2840 | 1.85e+08 | ||
| youi tue | 2840 | youtube | showing_results_for | 1.85e+08 |
| acerook | 2840 | 1.85e+08 | ||
| youetube | 2840 | 1.85e+08 | ||
| you tbut | 2840 | youtube | did_you_mean | 1.85e+08 |
| ykutube | 2840 | youtube | showing_results_for | 1.85e+08 |
| uotod | 2840 | youtube | showing_results_for | 1.85e+08 |
| utuen | 2840 | youtube | did_you_mean | 1.85e+08 |
| ytu tube | 2840 | 1.85e+08 |
As a result about half of all volume has a spell type. Although only ~1.4% of searches have a spell type.
| spell | volume | site |
|---|---|---|
| youtube | 35.3% | youtube |
| 8.7% | ||
| amazon | 7.6% | amazon |
| 6.3% | ||
| weather | 2.2% | weather |
| translate | 1.6% | translate |
| com | 1.5% | com |
| 1.3% | ||
| walmart | 1.3% | walmart |
| ebay | 1.2% | ebay |
The top 2000 searches have extremely high volume, while the vast majority of the rest of the searches are very low volume.
Note that many of these extremely high volume searches are not a search for something as such, but an attempt to go to one of the popular sites above.
(Note there are (at least) two additional SERP feature types (Knowledge Panel and Videos), for which the sample size is too small to include.)
The SERP features featured in the most searches are Image pack and People also ask:
The knowledge card has a huge effect in reducing the clicks-per-search, while the other SERP features have limited effect. Searches with the Shopping results SERP feature have higher cps on average.
Easy keywords have fewer SERP features.
Thumbnail & Top stories is the most common SERP feature pairing.
Searches without SERP features tend to be low volume.
Searches with more SERP features have higher mean difficulty.
We can see that searches with high return rates tend to have lower difficulty, and to be clicked on a lot more.
| return_rate | mean_cpc | mean_clicks | mean_difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| very high | 0.96 | 71423 | 18.4 |
| low | 0.70 | 15094 | 25.6 |
International searches have overall higher volume
| region | volume |
|---|---|
| US | 33% |
| International | 67% |
[Note, this doesn’t concur with the volume in the main data set. Not sure what is going on here.]
Internationally there are more searches with very low volume, while US has more searches with medium volume.
There is not a large difference in the number of searches with very high volume. However, the total volume of these searches is a lot higher internationally
Searches that have high US volume tend to have high international volume, and vice versa. But there are some exceptions.
| keyword | us_volume | international_volume |
|---|---|---|
| filmoviplex | 10 | 295990 |
| cloroquina | 200 | 5869800 |
| parivahan sewa | 10 | 276990 |
| jokaroom | 10 | 173990 |
| handball em | 20 | 327980 |
| keyword | us_volume | international_volume |
|---|---|---|
| football playoff schedule | 602000 | 1000 |
| frontier mail | 586000 | 1000 |
| spectrum mobile | 526000 | 1000 |
| chase bank near me | 523000 | 1000 |
| spectrum internet | 998000 | 2000 |
Searches that have higher volume in US have a higher click-per-search on average than searches that have higher volume internationally.
They also have a higher cost-per-click on average
Searches that have higher volume internationally, tend to have higher difficulty